The Bulgari Connection (21 page)

Mary House Convent, custom built for its purpose in the mid-nineteenth century, was oddly reminiscent of the torpid Tavington Court, for all its vaulted ceilings and wide pale corridors. The smell of boiled cabbage had got into the walls. At least in the mansion block the walls were steeped with the mixed aromas of Marks and Spencer's microwaveable dishes, or had been until lately, when the fumes of boiled mixed Chinese herbs took over.

Twelve very old nuns now inhabited a convent which had once housed a hundred. Only when the last one died would the premises be handed over to the developers. It was a prime building site, with a fine view of Windsor Castle from theempty top floor, for who was there any more to climb the stairs? In the meantime the Order in Rome stood out against any premature leasing out of even part of the premises as school, arts or community centre, as the local planners would have liked. The prayers of the faithful sustained the world, and the old ladies prayed: it was what they did. There was no-one coming up to take their place. These days spiritual girls, the ones in whose nature it was to deny the flesh, turned into anorexics or trained as social workers. They did not go into convents to live the life of prayer. Once the nuns were gone, once such few threads as still bound earth to heaven had finally snapped, the world would go spinning off to hell, and not stay poised just halfway there. Let God, and not the planners, decree when that would be. Or such was the feeling in Rome, though the nuns themselves, in the front line of the struggle between good and evil, seemed more hopeful.

‘Last time I was here,' said Emily to Grace, ‘she told me there was now more good in the world than bad. The convents had served their purpose. It's just that where there are angels there are devils as well, and the latter make so much noise the former tend to get overlooked. I'm sure she will be able to help you. She's a bit ga-ga but not too bad.'

Sister Cecilia sat up in her white-painted bare cell, in a tidy bed, looking out over a walled garden of extreme dullness and wetness. She peered out at them through faded but still acute eyes. She was frail but tough.

‘That's Emily,' she said. ‘I recognise Emily. Looks like a horse, always did. But who's the other one?'

She stared for a time at the basket Grace had over her arm: red Christmas apples, better for decoration than for eating, and the pale unnatural daffodils they manage to get into the shops inearly December. Then she looked up to Grace's face, and smiled and said, with joy, ‘Why look, it's Saint Dorothy. She's carrying her basket. Little Saint Dorothy herself, come to visit me on my deathbed! Shall we pray?'

Of course I am not Saint Dorothy. I am Grace Salt, who was foolish enough to give up her name. I am a middle-aged first wife with a young lover living in physical if not emotional comfort in London at the turn of the twenty-first century. Saint Dorothy was an early Christian Martyr who fell foul of the authorities and lived and died in the first century AD. The story goes that she was visited by two apostate women, but she managed to reconvert them, so the Emperor Diocletian sentenced her to be beheaded. On her way to execution a lawyer called Theophilus mocked her and asked her to send him flowers and fruit from the heavenly garden. Whereupon Dorothy simply turned into a smiling child carrying a basket, and offered him flowers and fruit from its depths. A miracle! Theophilus became a Christian on the spot and the pair of them were both then executed. Of such ironies are myths and legends made.

Saint Dorothy was a favourite of the religious painters – and what painter in the Middle Ages, what interpreter of God's creation, was allowed not to be religious – if only, I imagine, because a smiling child and a basket of fruit and flowers is such a rewarding subject to paint.

Perhaps I had heard the legend as a child, or seen paintings of Saint Dorothy, or read about her in
Little Lives of All the Saints,
and forgotten all about it. But after we had prayed to our Maker, the three of us kneeling on the green linoleum floor, declaring our sins and praising the Creation, and asking for our petitions to be granted, and giving thanks to Saint Dorothy, it seemed tome that my blouse was once again having to stretch to cover my chest, and not falling loosely over it. Perhaps it was all in my head, perhaps it was not, how am I to know and does it matter? I was looking down from a different angle.

‘I thought she was meant to be bed-bound,' said Emily on the way home. ‘She was out of that bed like greased lightning once she'd decided you were Saint Dorothy. She was decidedly more ga-ga this visit than last.'

‘I expect she just thinks she deserves a rest,' I said. ‘I expect one would, at ninety-eight. Life can be so exhausting.' ‘Her knees were good, if shrivelled,' said Emily. ‘In fact they bent a good deal better than mine.'

‘Practice,' I said, and kept my own counsel. ‘A lifetime of it.' ‘Anyway,' said Emily, ‘it was absurd of us to imagine you were growing younger. People just don't do that. You look about thirty to me, which is peculiar enough, but come to think of it mother always looked very young for her age. It's in the genes, lucky old you.' ‘Lucky old me,' I said.

‘I just get to look like a horse, like father,' she said. ‘When Cecilia was young her teeth weren't anything to write home about either. I expect it was because she was so plain she went into a convent.' ‘I expect so,' I said.

When we got back Walter was looking very young and perturbed and his hair was thick and flowing again and he said he'd had a phone call from Doris and we were both invited to the Manor House for Barley's sixtieth birthday, and were to bring her painting down with us.

‘She's got that wrong,' I said. ‘It's Barley's fifty-ninth.' But I wasn't going to tell Doris that. One can be altogether too saintly.

Wednesday, December 12th 8 a.m.-10a.m. The morning of the party dawned as fine and clear as it could for early December. All over London chauffeurs from the best hire car firms worked out distances and routes for that evening. It was one of the first big parties of the Christmas season. Anyone who mattered was going, if only because rumour had it that Barley Salt had extended himself and was about to go bust. They wanted to be in at the kill; they wanted to know how his new celebrity wife would take it. Many said it served him right, after the way he had behaved to poor Grace. Few had bothered to call her up or ask her round to anything more than a quick lunch in the kitchen, cancelled at the last moment, or a shopping expedition which never quite materialised. But they'd felt for her: they had. It could have been any of them, except they would have got out of the marriage at the first affair. Gone for the money, the alimony, and lived happily ever after: it was just that Grace was so nice she didn't know how to look after herself and she put up with too much. Which frankly made her rather dull. But dull women can be quite a threat, men seem to rather like them. And therewere few enough unattached men around to spare for a rainy day, everyone knew, without Grace nabbing one. But they felt themselves to be on her side, and
Artsworld Extra
had made a fool of itself promoting Leadbetter the way it had: Doris was a celebrity but with not quite the right kind of people. There was more to art than faeces, filtered and compacted though they may have been.

There was for example Lady Juliet's portrait by the young Walter Wells, which hung proudly above her fireplace, looking down at some of the best parties, the ones with the caviar by the bucketful, and Mr Makarov making jokes, and the rather strange-looking Billyboy Justice in tow. The new Salt couple hadn't been to many of those events, it had been noticed. They'd been paying more attention to each other than either could really afford. But Mr Wells might just be the face of the cultural future, Lady Juliet's jewels glittered so, and hadn't Grace actually gone and shacked up with him and lost a lot of weight? While Barley was putting it on.

But here was a surprise birthday party – rather naff, especially since it was Christmas; those with December or early-January birthdays should just shut up about them – but which had brought their student days to mind, and Doris was barely thirty and in TV so couldn't really be expected to know better. What's more she had laid on chauffeurs; and they said the refurbished Wild Oats – ridiculous name to change a house to – was a treat to behold, and that's why they had agreed to go.

Up and down the breakfast and bedside tables of social London the chattering went on. Those who can't live in a village create their own within the city, like calling to like,cellphones crying out for attention, recreating the gossip of the market-place.

10.20 a.m.

Grace and Walter rise from their tousled bed. They have slept later than they meant.

‘I don't really think I want to go to the Manor House,' says Grace. ‘I think Doris wants me there just to gloat. It is morally my house, in spite of what the lawyers said.' ‘I think you should come,' says Walter, ‘if only to protect me from her, and because I'd like your life to have started the moment you met me. I want to be sure, the whole world wants to be sure, that you're no longer pining for Barley.'

He runs all the way down the stairs and up again to fetch the newspaper. He finds he has rather more energy than usual, and puts it down to his having finished and sent off the extra canvases to the Manhatt., just in time. As his spirits lighten, so does his footfall. He quite looks forward to the unveiling of Doris's portrait this evening and wants Grace by his side. Of course he does.

So Grace agrees to go to her ex-husband's party, given by the new wife, as a civilised person must in these days of frequent divorce, or how could anyone live for rancour.

11.10a.m.

Grace goes round to Tavington Court to find her valium, all the same, as well as do the ironing and see how Ethel and Hashim are getting on. She has not had to take tranquillisers since meeting up with Walter. She can only hope Doris hasn't taken away too much of the Manor House's character, but

Ross has let slip a remark or two down at the Health Club which leads her to fear the worst.

‘My, you're looking tired today,' Mr Zeigler says to Grace when she lets herself in, by which she imagines he means she's looking rather older than she was. But that's okay: whatever it was has found its equilibrium at around thirty for her and forty for Walter, which could hardly be better. She feels quite confident about that: they are the lucky winners of one of life's great and rare prizes. Call it miracle, call it what you want. Just call me Dorothy.

Hashim has got the job with Harry Bountiful, the one Ross hasn't taken. He is to be a private detective. He says he is applying for citizenship through the proper channels. They explained at the Job Centre that he was eligible. Ethel tells Grace she's starting a computer-graphics course. She boldly ticked the ex-offenders box on the application form they gave her, and such is society's current desire to rehabilitate the wrongdoer she's been given priority status and can bypass the waiting list. Thank you, Grace, for everything.

11.50a.m.

‘Your ex-hubby was over looking for you,' says Mr Zeigler as Grace leaves. ‘That man can move fast when he has to.' It looked like a murder attempt to him, he says. He supposes he should be grateful he didn't have to scrape up blood and guts from the pavement. He's been to the doctor for nausea because of the cooking smells, was she aware of that? But Grace is barely listening. ‘The Russians!' she thinks.

A full five years now since Grace pointed out to Barley that the Russians would assume Opera Noughtie to be some kind of government-sponsored sex show – costing only the same asthe Dome, and likely to get a better return on their investment – and be none too pleased when they found out it wasn't. ‘Silly old Gracie,' he'd said, and kissed the top of her head, ‘leave the worrying to me.' Now she's frightened for Barley, but when she gets back to the studio she doesn't tell Walter this. At eighteen years of age she would have. At thirty-two she knows better. This is the wisdom of experience.

2.00p.m.

Carmichael's flight leaves for Wellington, New Zealand. Toby has finally answered his mobile and asked Carmichael to come out to meet him. All is well.

Emily and the dog catch a train back to York. It is as well she is amongst animal-lovers, because nerves make him pee up against the poles in the buffet area.

Grace keeps a hair appointment at Harrods and arranges to have her nails done. It's the only place in London where they don't raise their eyebrows at the sight of neglected nails, and Grace has lately been helping Walter stretch canvases for the Manhatt. She means to buy a dress for the evening but when it comes to it can't be bothered. She will wear her lucky crimson crushed velvet, the one the colour of blown roses. The fabric is coming back into fashion and doesn't even need ironing.

Lady Juliet goes to the bank in Knightsbridge and takes the Egyptian necklace out of her safe deposit-box, puts it in her Waitrose bag with the shopping and takes the Underground home to Victoria. If there's one thing she hates it's wasting money on taxis. She'll wear the white dress she was painted in by Walter Wells.

3 p.m.-4 p.m.

Christmas is coming: the holiday spirit is about to take over. In offices and boardrooms everywhere people struggle to get important things done by the end of the following week. After that phones will stay unanswered, crashed computers stay unserviced, e-mail be jammed with singing greeting cards. It will be the second week in January when the schools go back before normality returns.

At the Department of Trade and Industry a consensus is finally reached about the fate of the Opera Noughtie project. That it was under discussion in the first place is meant to be a secret, but Stock Exchange fluctuations demonstrate otherwise. Sir Ronald leaves smiling and goes home to Lady Juliet.

They manage half an hour in bed. She doesn't tell him she took the Underground. He'd have a fit. She doesn't tell him that after discussion with Chandri she's decided to have a face-lift. Not liposuction, it sounds too horrid. She'll wait until Sir Ron's off on some trip somewhere, and then nip into the clinic and have it done. She's looking forward to the Salt party. She wonders what Doris will wear: she hopes Doris didn't mind too much having her dress auctioned at the Little Children, Everywhere do. She, Lady Juliet, had rather twisted her arm. But it was in a good cause. So much was. It was time she forgave Doris for not answering the invitation but just turning up, and put her back on her party list.